Ancient Web: Michael Turner Followed Francis Drake's Anchorages

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most history projects examine where somebody went by reading a book. Michael Turner decided he needed to go to those places himself.

Visit In Drake's Wake

Turner's long-running In Drake's Wake project is a geographic investigation into the life and voyages of Sir Francis Drake. The homepage states that Turner started retracing Drake's movements in 1980, documenting locations on slide film. Its old-style footer carries a 1997–2006 copyright range, while the pages continue to be accessible under their original-style menus.

Turner credits the late Raymond Aker, a merchant mariner and president of the Drake Navigators Guild in California, with helping identify anchorages using voyage narratives, charts, and nautical experience. He dates that collaboration from 1983, and says their work helped build an archive of more than 11,000 photographic slides.

Those figures are Turner's own description of the project, not an independently audited archive inventory. Still, the surviving pages demonstrate a rare amount of personal fieldwork devoted to one historical voyager.

Shorelines matter as much as ships

The site's Drake research index branches into highly specific questions: whether Drake reached La Rochelle, where he appeared near Calais, what happened to treasure brought to London, and how the sailor's movements can be tracked through Somerset and Kent.

One page asks whether Drake ever went to Germany; another discusses the uncertainty around his birth year and links the problem to early voyages involving the Hawkins family. The index is not a chronological summary of every sea battle. It is a sequence of location problems to be tested against documentary evidence.

Turner also describes photographing copies of historical maps as part of the research. This is a useful example of the pre-smartphone method: travel, notebooks, film slides, archives, and patient correspondence becoming a website that readers could visit from anywhere.

The site makes strong claims about discoveries and precision. They remain the author's interpretations unless established by further independent historical scholarship; a historic anchorage is not proved simply because a modern traveler found a plausible bay.

That distinction does not diminish the Web artifact. It documents how far a committed amateur researcher could carry a project and how a personal website could preserve the resulting trail.

Explore Turner's Drake research index and his project overview.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.